Design and experimental evaluation of OnDemand inter-domain mobility in SDN supported PMIPv6

The soaring number of mobile devices and their demands for enhanced services have forced operators to adopt locally software defined and globally distributed multi-domain systems. Network managed IP mobility across these domains is significant, and needs to be handled at service level granularity with OnDemand approach for resource efficiency and minimal transmission delay. Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is a well-established network initiated local mobility solution. This paper evolves PMIPv6 to present a distributed architecture for OnDemand mobility across multiple domains with Software Defined Networking (SDN). In our proposed solution, controllers in SDN enabled PMIPv6 domains perform distributed communication with each other to provide inter-domain mobility. A novel home network prefix retrieval mechanism allows the domains to reclaim the prefixes once they are released by the mobile node. We also propose a route convergence based path update technique to reduce the transmission delay; and present a detailed experimental and analytical performance evaluation for handover delay, transmission delay, and control signaling overhead. The results show 4–9% and 30–45% gain over current work in handover delay and transmission delay, respectively.